


to fall from a great and gruesome height

by meriwethersays



Series: look up, climb up, fall down [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, I guess I'm doing this after all, Not everyone dies, but most of them still do, raging PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 00:00:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9096361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meriwethersays/pseuds/meriwethersays
Summary: If there is a theme to her life, it is this: people leave her.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> writing intermittently and without a fixed endpoint, so be forewarned.

For one reason or another, Jyn always knew that she would die young. Everyone around her either died or left her. She was not being melodramatic about it; she had made a realistic assessment of her situation in life, based on the evidence around her. And when they took the shuttle to Scarif -- even more, when they landed on Scarif -- she knew that it was her turn. It was one thing to fly undetected into an Imperial installation, but they'd never had a hope of flying out again, not really. 

So she leans into Cassian and lets him rest his weight on her in the elevator back down to the beach. They are too far from Bodhi and the transport to walk, not with her ankle and Cassian bleeding and clutching his side. She tells herself that's it, rather than what she knows must be true, that Bodhi is somewhere in that plume of smoke rising from the landing pad. She is going to die telling herself that no one else is leaving her, that she is leaving with all of them.

Cassian tights his fingers around her hand to the point of pain as they collapse on the sand. "Your father would have been proud of you," he tells her, and she smiles. Cassian pulls her closer as they watch the end of the world approach, wrapped in each other's arms, and she stares at the fire on the horizon and thinks, at least it ends here.

But someone grabs Cassian and he pulls her with him, half-drags her backwards up a ramp and into a U-wing so that they fall onto the floor still holding each other, and Jyn wants to scream, No, no, I earned this death. The light around them is blinding and if she is going to die in the annihilation of Scarif she wanted it to be on that beach with someone holding her, knowing that she had made her father proud. Cassian moans in pain and she realizes that she's struggling against him, that she has just elbowed him in his broken ribs trying to escape his arms. Someone says "Calm her down, she's only going to make it worse," and someone else jabs her in the neck. She tries to fight against the darkness enfolding her -- she wanted to burn up, to die in the light instead of in the dark holes where people are always leaving her -- but she can't.


	2. Chapter 2

She's had this dream before.

She is a child, running with her mother as her papa goes to confront Krennic and give them time to escape. This time, when her mother stops them and ties the necklace around her neck and says "Trust the Force," Jyn grabs her mother's hand and says, "No, come with me." This time, her mother stops and realizes that she should not be selfish. This time, her mother does not throw her life away against death troopers to make a pointless stand. This time, she realizes what Jyn's life will be like with no mother and no father, raised by a militant rebel who will treat her like his own daughter and train her to fight a war she does not want to care about. And so this time, her mother squeezes Jyn's hand and stands up and says "We have to hurry and find Saw." This time, Jyn has her mother in the hidey-hole to hold her when the lantern flickers and boost her up when Saw finds them.

But that's where the dream always ends. Because her mother left her. She chose what she had to know was a meaningless gesture of defiance over her daughter, and she left.

Jyn wakes to find tears leaking out of her crusty eyes. It smells like green things and musty stone all around her; when her vision clears a little, she realizes that she is back on Yavin 4. In a bed, her whole body aching like she's been hit with hammers, her arms tied to the bed. She wrenches hard against the restraints a few times, testing for weaknesses, but the adrenaline that has saved her so many times in the past is curiously absent. She's weak, too weak to do anything more than pull and thrash a little, and even that leaves her exhausted.

When she cranes her neck, she sees Cassian in the next bed.  He's not strapped down, but he's loose-limbed in a way that suggests deep sleep, mouth open.  She doesn't think she's ever seen him sleep.  Even so, there's no way a man like him sleeps so carelessly without the aid of drugs.  "Let me out of this!" she finally demands, sounding more like a petulant child than she has in many years.  
  
A medical droid approaches.  "You have been restrained for your own safety, Jyn Erso," it says.  "Your excessive motion has hindered your recovery."  
  
Jyn clenches her muscles in an attempt to make herself lie still and is rewarded with pain.  Still, she forces herself to stay still and says "I will stop moving if you release me."  
  
The droid looks as skeptical as it can -- K2SO had an exceptionally expressive face, Jyn remembers, and tries to tamp down something that she thinks is a feeling -- but presses a button to retract the restraints.  Jyn sits up and promptly discovers that her body is not capable of holding her up for very long.  
  
"You need further rest," the droid informs her.  "Your systems are very weak and you resisted the bacta tank."  
  
"I hate that stuff."  Too many bad memories, and she can't stand being trapped in a tank with only a breathing mask.  
  
"That was apparent," the droid says.  "Try to rest.  You will recover faster if you are not sedated, but I will sedate you if it becomes necessary."  
  
With that vague threat looming, Jyn rolls onto her side so that she can watch Cassian and as much of the room as possible.  She wishes she had a wall at her back like she'd had in the Imperial prison, but this room is cavernous and the walls are lined with medical equipment.  She closes her eyes and pretends that sleep will come to her naturally, though it never has before.  
  
Even with her eyes closed, Jyn exists for what seems like hours in a space between sleep and wakefulness.  A bang in the hospital room and she feels the heat of the Alliance bombs on her face on Eadu; a hiss and she feels the door locking shut behind them on Scarif.  A bright light and she is watching annihilation approach on the beach.  She doesn't know how many times she kicks or jerks awake before she opens her eyes yet again to see Cassian's eyes open as well and realize that he is watching her from his bed.  
  
"We lived," she says, and tries to make it sound like she's happy about it.  
  
"Yes."  His voice is flat.  Jyn wonders if he wanted to die on the beach too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there is one thing that drives me bonkers in heroic narratives, it is parents abandoning their children and dying meaningless deaths. No way did Jyn's mother think she was actually going to be able to make Krennic leave with a single blaster.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alderaan, and despair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Winging it on the timeline a little bit.

It's her first day up and walking around when the news comes in. No one has been willing to tell her anything about the Death Star plans, beyond the fact that an Alliance ship did indeed receive their transmission.  But this news can't be kept secret.  Jyn is in the canteen next to Cassian, who she can't quite look full in the face and who she hasn't exchanged more than a few words with yet, but who she doesn't like to let out of her sight either.  She's poking a spoon into some mush when someone announces over the crackling intercom, "Alderaan has been destroyed by the Death Star."  
  
Her ears roar and she is back on Jedha, stumbling across the heaving ground to get outside and abandon Saw.  The horizon rises up to swallow them and Cassian is shouting in her ear as they run for the ship.  Then she's on the floor of the ship again, staring out the window, powerless to do anything about the earth closing its maw around them--  
  
"Jyn!" Someone grabs her arm--Cassian--and she jerks away, but she's back in the canteen on Yavin 4.  Around her, some people are crying; others are muttering fiercely, dire threats against the Empire.  And she is--hot nausea creeping up her throat, heart pounding and skin burning, but she won't throw up and she wishes she could.  Wishes that her body would reflect the tearing emptiness that is eating her from the inside.  She stands, and isn't that stupid, that she should be able to stand up and walk when millions of lives have just end.  
  
She walks out of the canteen almost blindly--but no, Chirrut would have walked it better, if he hadn't died for nothing--and it's good that no one tries to stop her because there is a blaster strapped to her thigh that she found on her way to the canteen and nothing matters.  
  
Cassian follows her.  She only realizes because she is making her way up, up the outside of the ancient temple that holds the canteen, half-walking and half-climbing, and she cannot help looking back when she hears the footsteps behind her.  "Go away," she says, though it's not what she wants him to do.  
  
"You're in shock," he tells her.  
  
"Fuck you, you're in shock," she says back, and at least she has anger to cling to.  "Don't tell me how I'm feeling."  
  
He doesn't argue.  
  
"It was all a waste," she says.  "My father.  Saw.  Bodhi.  Baze and Chirrut.  K2.  My mother."  
  
"All my men," Cassian says.  "We led them to death for those plans.  And we failed."  
  
She doesn't realize that she's collapsed until she feels the mossy stone wall at her back.  "I can't do this.  How have you survived so long, when all we do is lose?"  
  
Cassian is still standing, perched on the edge of the wall.  "I don't know."  He turns and looks at her, straight in the eyes.  "I can't remember feeling this way since I joined the Rebellion."  
  
"Since you were six."  When Jyn tries to close her eyes, she sees the wall of light advancing on them on the Scarif beach.  "It isn't fair," she says, the refrain of a child that she'd long since given up on saying.  
  
"Jyn," Cassian says.  "You are the only thing keeping me from going insane right now."  It's too honest for Jyn to handle, not when she is flying apart in all directions.  
  
"I wish we had died on the beach with the rest of them."  She sees the words hit him, sees his knees buckle a little.  Good.  "We did what we were supposed to do--"

"What we were not supposed to do," Cassian interjects.

"--and we sent them the plans and it was supposed to be over and I was ready to die."  Jyn's body is beginning to gasp for breath without her permission.  "I wanted to die thinking we had saved the world.  And we didn't.  All we did was kill everyone around us."  She wraps her arms around herself because she's breaking, choking on air as sobs wrack her body, and if she closes her eyes the tears will fall.  "I can't."  
  
He collapses next to her and grips her hand as tightly as he'd done on the beach.  He doesn't say anything and Jyn is glad because any word will push her over the edge.  She can't breathe, shaking with the effort of trying not to cry aloud, and then he wraps his arms around her and she's blind with tears, gagging and coughing as she sobs.  She is only barely aware enough to feel that he's shaking too.


	4. Chapter 4

They sit there, breathing, on the old temple walls for a long time.  Jyn doesn't know how long; she doesn't know the light on Yavin well enough to figure out the time of day.  When Jyn speaks again, her voice is thick from crying.  "I suppose I should be glad that no one knows who we are."  As far as she can tell, people more or less know about the attack on Scarif, but most are entirely unaware that she and Cassian are the only survivors -- and what a stupid word, survive, like they had done something special to earn it instead of being retrieved at the very last second -- and so they pass unnoticed.  
  
Cassian utters a strangled noise.  "Yes, everyone who knows me followed--"  He stops, draws in a shaky breath.  "Do you really think it's better?"  
  
She doesn't know.  She has never been good at staying detached.  She loved her parents, heedless of the danger they faced, and was bereft when they left her.  She loved Saw without regard for the fact that he was a soldier and then he tore himself away from her too.  She spent only a few days with Baze and Chirrut and Bodhi and could not stop herself from loving them even as she knew it was a war and they would leave eventually.  Caring about people has never been the hard part for her.  It's better, maybe, if people don't know her, if they don't let her latch onto them so that she cannot be destroyed when they leave.  And now, now that she has failed so completely, there is no one but herself and Cassian to understand the depth of it.  


* * *

  
It is only a day or two later--hours of numbly lying in what has been designated her bunk, trying to sleep and failing, of wandering the halls waiting for someone to tell her what she's supposed to do next, of trailing after Cassian or letting him trail after her, since he seems to feel the same way about not letting her out of sight too much--that she is out in the landing bay and sees a battered Corellian freighter land to much excitement.  She turns to the nearest person in a uniform and says "Who's that?"  Cassian, ten feet away and pretending to poke at a datapad, jerks and looks up as well.  
  
"Not sure," the woman says.  "Only just got a message saying there was an urgent landing coming in."  
  
Jyn backs into the shadows a little and finds Cassian at her side.  "Do you know who it is?" she asks.  
  
Cassian doesn't answer for a little while, but she knows that he heard her.  "I have a hope," he finally says.  "If she was not on...Alderaan."  There's the tiniest hitch in his voice before he says the planet's name, and Jyn hates that he thinks her so fragile that she can't hear the name of the planet that they couldn't save.  Even if there is good reason to think that's true.  Or maybe it's that he still can't bear to think about it either.  
  
They fall silent and watch four figures descend from the freighter.  A Wookiee, two men, and a young woman dressed all in white.  Jyn hears Cassian's sharp intake of breath and says, "What? Who is it?"  
  
"Princess Leia of Alderaan," Cassian says.  "Her ship had the Death Star plans on it when it was captured.  But if she is here..."  Two droids trundle down the ramp as well.  "If she is here, they may have the plans."  
  
Somehow it's more of a blow to hear him mention the Death Star plans than it is to hear the name of Alderaan.  Those plans caused so much trouble, stole her mother and father away, tricked her into leading Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi and so many other men to their deaths, and Jyn fights a wave of inconvenient emotions.  She find herself gripping his hand and can't tell who reached out first.  
  
"They had better have those fucking plans."  She wants it to sound sharp, declarative, but her voice breaks on the last word.  Cassian's hand tightens on hers.  
  
"I will tell you whatever I find out."  
  
They stand together, clutching each other's hands and watching the ripples of excitement spread through the landing bay.  
  
* * *  
  
It's the princess who finds her first.  Jyn has started walking toward the canteen, trying to convince herself that she's hungry and trying not to go look for Cassian because she can't follow him everywhere.  Out in the open air, a female voice says "Jyn Erso?"  
  
Jyn turns.  She can barely look the princess in the eyes.  "Yes," she murmurs, and fights to breathe evenly.  She failed to save this woman's planet.  Bail Organa, the princess's father, died on Alderaan, and the Rebellion remembers him as a hero -- not like her father, at best half-redeemed by sending Bodhi when it was already too late.  
  
"Thank you," Princess Leia says, and it's the worst thing she could say.  Jyn would rather be raged at; she wishes someone would say aloud at her all the things she is telling herself internally, that they should have gotten to Scarif sooner, that they should have had a better plan, that someone who knew what she was doing would have gotten the plans out fast enough to destroy the Death Star before it killed Alderaan.  
  
Jyn shakes her head.  She can't manage to say anything.  
  
Princess Leia reaches out and takes Jyn's hand.  "No.   _Thank you_.  You risked your life to steal those plans."  
  
"I risked a lot of other people's lives -- lost a lot of other people's lives."  Her voice is thick.  "We didn't get them fast enough."  
  
"Jyn."  The princess's tone makes her raise her eyes.  "Alderaan was destroyed because I would not tell Darth Vader where to find this base."  Princess Leia's voice is hard, strong in a way that Jyn would not have expected.  "He tortured me to find this base, and when I would not tell him, he used the Death Star to kill my entire planet."  She closes her eyes briefly.  "I will not give you my choices, and you cannot take them from me."  
  
Jyn has been injured maliciously and mindlessly, hurt as punishment and as a lesson and almost constantly by accident, but she has never been tortured.  "I'm sorry," she says.  
  
"When I say thank you, I mean it.  Because you shouldered the burden of leading men into almost certain death, we have the plans and we can destroy the Death Star.  We can turn the tide on the Emperor and Darth Vader."  Princess Leia almost smiles, her face too heavy with sorrow to form the expression fully.  "That's what this Rebellion is.  We sacrifice ourselves, our hearts, our peace of mind, so that someday there will be no need to do so anymore.  We may not live to see it, but that's the price we pay."  
  
She's in awe of this woman, this woman who is younger than she is, who can carry the weight of the choices she's made without splintering apart under them the way that Jyn is doing.  Jyn is too choked with sadness and anger and something that could be hope to speak, but when Princess Leia draws her into a hug, Jyn clings to her like her strength could rub off somehow.  
  
"They're analyzing the plans now," Princess Leia says when she and Jyn have separated.  "They will find the best way to take advantage of the weakness that your father placed.  We'll destroy it."  
  
"Thank you," Jyn manages to say.  "Thank you."  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I fucking love Princess Leia. I wish we'd gotten to see her meet Jyn.
> 
> Timeline still iffy, but I'm guessing that's not the chief thing on everyone's minds. I'm playing a bit fast and loose with how I think Jyn and Cassian would actually be doing, mental health-wise, only a few days to a week after Scarif. For the sake of the story, their PTSD is rather less severe than I think would be likely.
> 
> Feedback always appreciated. I will be cleaning up/tweaking as I go.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Dar Williams' "Iowa."


End file.
